CEO Scam: Fraudsters now preying on start up employees for money
2 min read . Updated: 09 Apr 2023, 11:08 AM IST
PremiumIn a recent case of CEO fraud scam, Meesho's employee, Shikhar Saxena shared an instance where he received a scam message from a person posing as Meesho CEO, Vidit Aatrey, to make payment
From sim cards to customer care servicing, there would hardly be any option left unexplored by scammers to trap people for money. However, with the evolution of digital platforms and growing accessibility to contact details of people, scammers have begun preying upon startup employees by faking themselves as the company CEO.
In a recent case, Meesho employee, Shikhar Saxena, shared an incident where he received a message from an impostor who pretended to be the Meesho CEO, Vidit Aatrey. The imposter asked Shikhar to make some urgent payments.
‘Latest scam in the startup world - message from the CEO,’ tweeted Shikhar Sharma while sharing the screenshot of the conversation with the scammer.
In the screenshot, an unknown number, with a profile pic of the Meesho founder, texted Shikhar with his introduction. Later, he informed Shikhar of being on a conference call and requested to make payment for a client's gift. He even assured Shikhar of reimbursing the amount later.
“I am currently on a conference call with a client and I need to provide this client with some gift. Can you confirm if you can make this purchase from Paytm? I will reimburse you," texted the scammer to Shikhar Sharma.
Soon after sharing the incident on Twitter, several other people also recalled similar incident happened with them. Some expressed their concern over the more channelised way of scammers of targeting people, whereas other people pointed out towards the 'common script' used by these scammers on every conversation.
Sharing a similar incident, Akash Gupta, CEO and Founder of Zypp Electric, replied to Shikhar's comment, 'Yes, few people shared this for me too. What’s this fraud now."
“I get the same but the twist is via email. That too from CEO of my current working company. Idk how they find out,"replied another Twitter user on the post.
“It’s not just the startup world. Even employees at established companies have received these messages from scamsters,"said another user on the post.
Highlighting on the rampant cases of such kind of fraud, Twitter user named ‘Nandan Kumar’ called such cases to be instances of ‘CEO Fraud’
“Usually it’s done through mail. But WhatsApp is even better, they don’t have to put much efforts,"he tweeted.